Originally Posted: October 15, 2015
Rereading passages of “Moby-Dick,” I have no idea how my old English teacher once kept 20 hormonal teenagers from staging a mutiny of bawdy wisecracks. It helped, I suppose, that ours was a very conservative Christian prep school. If any of us was tempted to see risque puns lurking in Melville’s classic novel, we knew to pray rather than titter.
Times have changed.
Oct. 18 marks the 164th birthday of “Moby-Dick,” and if you’re looking for the perfect gift for a literary nerd with a ribald sense of humor, ahoy — thar she blows: An English professor and a couple of his former students have produced a card game based on “Moby-Dick” called simply “Dick.”
[The Totally Hip Video Book Reviewer searches for Melville]
For $19.75, you get a box of 400 white cards containing short phrases from Melville’s novel. Each player starts with 12. Here, for example, are several cards chosen at random (and then rejected and chosen again and again until I found three that could get by the copy desk). READ MORE